“Grown Men Don’t Cry”
Tim McGraw
Written by Tom Douglas and Steve Seskin
Radio & Records
#1 (2 weeks)
June 8 – June 15, 2001
Billboard
#1 (1 week)
June 16, 2001
I remember reading a review in New Country magazine in the nineties that observed the following: “Nothing ages worse than yesterday’s sentimentality.”
The writer was evaluating The Essential Dottie West, which focused on West’s work for RCA and included the astonishingly cloying divorce songs “Mommy Can I Still Call Him Daddy” and “Six Weeks Every Summer (Christmas Every Other Year.)” Even as a teenager, I had enough self-awareness to wonder how I’d feel about “Don’t Take the Girl” and “How Can I Help You Say Goodbye” when I was older.
Lord, can I tell the difference between those two records now, and I’ll throw “Grown Men Don’t Cry” in there for good measure. I don’t think this song is as cloying as the West hits or McGraw’s first big ballad hit, but the songwriters take a big swing and a miss with their poverty voyeurism, as a gorgeous metaphor for a hugging, struggling mother and son hits a harsh wall of judgment: “Like ice cream melting they embraced, years of bad decisions running down her face.”
It’s amazing to me that the songwriters who were able to write a genuinely heartbreaking second verse of an absentee father emotionally abandoning his son wrote something so disconnected from the realities of poverty in the first verse, but that might be an unavoidable side effect of having those who haven’t experienced poverty try to write about it. The songwriters would’ve been better served building an entire song around that graveside moment.
In recent years, new singer-songwriters like Jason Isbell, Ashley McBryde, and Kane Brown have all written much better songs that come from an authentic understanding of socioeconomic struggle. If Tim wants to go back to this well, he should check out those publishing catalogs.
“Grown Men Don’t Cry” gets a B-.
Every No. 1 Single of the 2000s
Previous: Kenny Chesney, “Don’t Happen Twice” |
Not a classic but a very good song. I would give this on a “B+”.
The first verse really kneecaps the next two, I agree. I think I also went with a B-.
As we enter the “Set This Circus Down” era, we move definitively past the era of “peak Tim McGraw” of the late 90s. “Grown Men Don’t Cry” isn’t a bad record but I knew the first time I heard this one that it wasn’t gonna have the intended emotional effect on me. Your quoted comment on “nothing aging worse than yesterday’s sentimentality” certainly has some merit, but more than being a matter of “aging badly” I think sentimentality is subjective. I can be moved to tears by a sad country song from 30 years ago that does nothing for my girlfriend while she can be moved to tears by an animated Disney movie that leaves me fully dry-eyed. Specific to Tim McGraw, I recall NBA player Jimmy Butler saying he became a country fan because “Don’t Take the Girl” hit him like a freight train when he heard it for the first time a generation after its chart run, so at least for him, yesterday’s sentimentality aged fine. Even for me, if a song moved me in the 80s or the 90s, I’m likely to revisit it frequently enough in ensuing years that it never felt particularly dated, but it’s reasonable to assume that makes me an outlier. I also suspect the impact of the sentimentality is more likely to feel dated to a new generation of listeners based on the musical arrangement than the lyrics.
Enough rambling about that. While I arrive at the same verdict as you about “Grown Men Don’t Cry”, I’m not exactly on the same page about the specifics. Its sentimental currency is limited by strict adherence to the formula that prevents any of the individual narratives to feel fully realized. As soon as I heard the chorus after the first verse, I knew the subsequent verses would involve the narrator grieving the loss of a parent and finding himself through his own children. It’s a tried and true formula that usually works to a limited degree as it does here, but fails to land any lyrical or musical hook to distinguish itself into my top tier(s) of sentimental songs. I’m also not a fan of when songs break their rhythm for a lyric that doesn’t fit, so the jumbled relaying of “it was just a dream, he was a slave to his job” is a hiccup to the song’s pacing that I have a hard time getting past.
As for the line about “years of bad decisions running down her face”, it does seem judgy and my ears perk up when I hear it for its disconnect from the compassionate intent. I usually don’t penalize the narrator or the songwriters very harshly for this sort of thing though, particularly if it doesn’t appear to come from a place of malice. It’s the narrator’s story to tell and I don’t feel as though I have to agree with every value he espouses to enjoy the song. But this feeds into a bigger debate of how to judge a song that one may otherwise like but which is beset by a single line or lyric that is troubling either because of lazy, tone-deaf, or mean-spirited songwriting. There have already been some instances of this in past reviews and there will be additional opportunities for this specific evaluation scenario in the near future with some of the upcoming #1s of 2001.
Grade: B-
Wow, we really disagree on Tim McGraw songs. I love this song. It’s AT LEAST an A- for me. Great song.
But Tim can’t miss for me with anything he released from Everywhere, A Place In The Sun, and Set This Circus Down.